Alaska’s searing summer heat ‘off the charts’
Record-breaking summer affecting humans and wildlife alike
Steve Perrins didn’t see the lightning, but he couldn’t miss the smoke that followed.
It was around dinnertime on July 23 at Alaska’s oldest hunting lodge, nestled in the wilderness more than 150 kilometres northwest of Anchorage. What began as a quiet evening at the Rainy Pass Lodge turned frantic as Alaska’s latest wildfire spread fast.
The Alaska National Guard soon evacuated 26 people by helicopter from the lodge, which serves as a checkpoint for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
The fire came within a half-mile of the lodge. In the days that followed, Perrins and his family housed and fed dozens of federal and state firefighters who rushed to contain the blaze — one of many raging across Alaska.
The northernmost U.S. state is warming faster than any other, having heated up more than 2 degrees Celsius over the past century — double the global average. And parts of the state, including its far northern reaches, have warmed even more rapidly in recent decades. This trend, driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, is transforming America’s only Arctic state. Scientists around the world, including in the U.S. government, predict the warming will continue unless countries drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in coming years.
“It’s the hottest summer we’ve had, ever,” said Perrins, who began working at the lodge in 1977.
Temperatures have been above average across Alaska every day since April 25. None of the state’s nearly 300 weather stations have recorded a temperature below freezing since June 28 — the longest such streak in at least 100 years. On Independence Day, the temperature at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport hit 90 degrees (32C) for the first time on record.
More than 2 million acres have gone up in flames across the state as thousands of firefighters have worked to contain wildfires. Stores have sold out of fans and ice. Moose have been spotted seeking respite in garden sprinklers.
Alaska, which logged its warmest June on record, now seems destined to register not only its warmest July but also its warmest month.
“Usually, if you were to break this sort of record, you’d do it by a sliver of a degree,” said Brian Brettschneider, a climatologist and research associate at the International Arctic Research Center. He said that the state is on course to shatter the record by more than one degree Fahrenheit.
The combination of relentless high pressure, extremely warm sea surface temperatures and high humidity are “basically off the charts,” Brettschneider said.
The entire Arctic is suffering under extreme temperatures. In Siberia, sweeping wildfires are sending smoke thousands of kilometres away and lofting dark soot particles onto the vulnerable Arctic ice cover. Arctic sea ice is melting at an alarming pace and could break the 2012 record. In addition, the weather system that caused last week’s heat wave in Western Europe has now settled above the Atlantic side of the Arctic, accelerating surface-ice melting in Greenland.
Mark Parrington, a senior scientist with the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service in Europe, said that through July 28, wildfires in the Arctic region, including Siberia and Alaska, had emitted the greatest total of carbon dioxide — 125 metric megatons — of any year-to-date since such monitoring began in 2003.
“We’re seeing something exceptional this year,” Parrington said, even though the acreage burned in Alaska is not yet a record.
Even as researchers in Alaska are working to capture climate change’s impact on the region, sharp cuts by Gov. Mike Dunleavy to the state’s education budget threaten to trigger an exodus of some of the very scientists who are trying to explain the unprecedented changes that residents are experiencing.
“I think it will lead to many of the best Arctic scientists in UA system (leaving) the state,” Christopher Arp, an associate research professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks Water and Environmental Research Center, said in an email. “Having scientists live where they do research is very important in my view, so I think that will have a negative impact on Arctic research that will be very challenging to reverse.”
Meanwhile, this summer’s heat has transformed Alaska’s landscape and waterways, affecting humans and wildlife alike.
The early retreat of sea ice from the Bering and Chukchi seas has led to a jump in sea surface temperatures, altering weather patterns and upending the lives of residents who typically depend on the ice cover for hunting and fishing. It’s also affecting native species that inhabit the area, including seals and seabirds.
As of July 28, the Chukchi Sea, northwest of Alaska, had just 20 per cent of its ice cover left — a record low for this time of year, according to figures from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Michael Wald, a wilderness guide, was paddling recently in Demarcation Bay on the Beaufort Sea coast. He had traversed those same waters a decade ago and had a hard time finding a campsite because of ankle-deep muck each time he pulled ashore.
This time, the ground was parched. “The tundra is so dry you could camp anywhere. It was almost unrecognizable.”
In south-central Alaska, residents face a different outlook: streams that are running high because snow and glaciers are melting quickly. While this is peak season for fly-in fishing trips, some pilots have had to revise their fight plans, wary of dropping off clients near raging rivers.
The hot days, tinged with wildfire smoke, also have meant a run on fans and air conditioners in a place where few people have needed them. “Most homes in Alaska are built to trap heat inside,” said Rick Thoman, an Alaska climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center. “So you get the choice between it being super hot and stuffy inside, or very warm and smoky outside.”
Tim Craig, who owns Anchorage True Value Hardware, calculated that his fan sales are up 125 per cent compared with last year. From mid-June through last week, he said, every fan that arrived in his store’s weekly shipment was either spoken for ahead of time or gone by day’s end.
“People were desperate,” he said.